“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 9/3/2018

Above the Trend Line: your industry rumor central is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items grouped by category such as M&A activity, people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, customer wins, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide you a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help you keep abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We’re working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Heard of something yourself? Tell us! Just e-mail me at: daniel@insidebigdata.com. Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

Let’s start with some M&A news … DataDirect Networks (DDN®) announced that it expects to finalize the acquisition of Tintri, Inc. (Tintri) within the next few days. The acquisition will bring immediate support and product continuity to Tintri’s extensive customer base, while significantly boosting DDN’s product portfolio and addressable market. Tintri’s groundbreaking, market-proven virtualization technology and extensive software suite greatly expands DDN’s award-winning line-up of storage products for data-intensive organizations. With Tintri flying under the DDN banner, DDN broadens its data-at-scale capabilities by adding the most advanced virtualization and analytics software suite for enterprise and hybrid cloud customers. DDN has been active in hiring and building a talented team of support, engineering and field operations professionals to fully support Tintri customers as they rely on Tintri solutions to expand and grow their businesses … erwin, Inc., the data governance company, announced its acquisition of metadata management and data governance provider AnalytiX DS (ADS), enhancing the company’s EDGE Data Governance Platform with the broadest set of metadata connectors and automated code generation, data mapping and cataloging tools. This strategic move makes erwin one of the industry’s only software providers to own every critical piece of the data management and data governance lifecycle, designed to enable every stakeholder – from data scientists, enterprise architects and business analysts to the C-suite – to accelerate the transformation of data into accurate and actionable business insights.

In new funding news, we heard … Cloudian announced that it raised $94 million in a Series E funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $173 million. The round includes participation from investors Digital Alpha, Eight Roads Ventures, Goldman Sachs, INCJ, JPIC (Japan Post Investment Corporation), NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. and WS (Wilson Sonsini) Investments. Cloudian will use this investment, which is the largest single round to date for a distributed file systems and object storage provider, to expand its worldwide sales and marketing efforts and increase its engineering team to meet rising demand for its limitlessly-scalable enterprise storage solutions … Spotinst has raised $35 million in a Series-B funding round for its AI based workload management platform, which helps companies to manage and optimize their cloud computing spend across several cloud providers. The funding round was led by Highland, with participation from existing investors Leaders Fund, Intel Capital, and Vertex Ventures. Spotinst has now raised approximately $52m since launch. Founded by Amiram Shachar, Liran Polak and Aharon Twizer in 2015, Spotinst helps businesses to manage their compute infrastructure across different cloud providers, while also achieving savings of 80% on average on regular cloud computing costs, by tapping into excess compute capacity in data centres operated by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

We also learned of several new partnerships, alignments and collaborations … Databricks, a leader in unified analytics and founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, and Snowflake Computing, the data warehouse built for the cloud, announced their strategic partnership and the integration of their products, which have already benefited joint customers. With an integrated solution, Databricks and Snowflake enable organizations to seamlessly leverage massive volumes of historical data with dynamic streaming data to drive powerful machine learning insights. This integration liberates organizations bogged down from the costs, limitations and maintenance of on-premise data analytics solutions. Databricks and Snowflake currently have joint customers, including Overstock.com, ShopRunner, Handshake, Hotel Tonight, and Rue Gilt Groupe … C3 IoT announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate AI and IoT application development for enterprise digital transformation. With this partnership, C3 IoT and Google Cloud have developed an integrated solution that seamlessly delivers the C3 IoT Platform – a comprehensive platform as a service (PaaS) for rapidly developing and operating big data, predictive analytics, AI, and IoT software applications – on Google Cloud Platform, leveraging its cutting-edge infrastructure and AI services. Additionally, the companies will execute co-marketing, co-selling, and co-training initiatives to rapidly scale distribution globally and accelerate customer success … FixStream, a pioneer in solutions for Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), and Cherwell Software, a global leader in enterprise service management, announced a strategic collaboration designed to accelerate digital transformation. The two companies will integrate their technologies to provide customers with a next-generation IT Operations solution leveraging machine learning with workflow automation to help more quickly and accurately find, predict and resolve ITSM (information technology service management) issues … ON Semiconductor (Nasdaq: ON) is collaborating with Optimal Plus to gather, analyze and build actionable insights out of the company’s manufacturing data. As a leading supplier to the automotive industry, ON Semiconductor is pioneering innovative technologies that enable all aspects of automated driving and vehicle electrification. The company is also committed to developing the semiconductor technology capable of supporting the rigors of IoT and empowering businesses to capitalize on their investments to drive profitability and ultimately success.

In the new customer wins category, we learned … WhereScape, a leading provider of data infrastructure automation software, announced that Aptus Health reduced its time to deliver a cloud-based data vault using WhereScape Data Vault Express for Snowflake. Using the automation software, Aptus Health designed the first version of their data vault in just three days, and within three months, delivered the production version on Snowflake – the data warehouse built for the cloud … DBmaestro, a pioneer and leading DevSecOps platform for database release automation solution provider announced that it has been selected by nine organizations in the last six months and twenty one financial institutions in total to run database deployments securely and efficiently, increase development team productivity and significantly decrease time-to-market for software solutions … Wovenware, a U.S. nearshore provider of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based services and solutions, announced that it has been selected by the Puerto Rico Science, Technology & Research Trust to develop an AI-based machine learning solution that will automate the identification and classification of Aedes Aegyptis. The purpose is to control the spread of the vector, or mosquito, that can infect people with diseases such as Zika, Dengue and Chikungunya across Puerto Rico, and ultimately nationwide. The other purpose of this labeling is to develop safe and more effective insecticides. The project, supported by a $50M grant from the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is currently underway by the Trust’s Puerto Rico Vector Control Unit (PRVCU).

We also heard of some new people movement news … Snowflake Computing, the data warehouse built for the cloud, announced that Thomas Tuchscherer has joined Snowflake as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective immediately. He is responsible for all aspects of the company’s finance organization and reports to Snowflake’s Chief Executive Officer, Bob Muglia. Tuchscherer has worked in the technology industry for nearly 20 years in North America and Europe. Prior to Snowflake, he spent eight years at Talend, serving as CFO since 2012. During his tenure, he led Talend through a successful IPO and helped the company increase revenue 20x. Before Talend, he held senior finance and strategy positions at SAP, Business Objects and Cartesis … Camille Renshaw, CEO and co-founder of B+E, the first tech-driven brokerage and trading platform for net lease real estate, will serve as a board member on the Rutgers Big Data Advisory Board, part of the Rutgers University Center for Innovation Education.

And finally, we heard on the street that Jumio, the creator of Netverify™ Trusted Identity as a Service (TIaaS), announced the launch of Jumio AI Labs in Montreal dedicated to the creation, experimentation, and at-scale deployment of machine learning and deep learning technologies. The new office will expand upon the innovation driven by Jumio’s Vienna-based AI team by building production models that perform three vital functions related to online identity verification: data extraction, fraud detection, and risk scoring. Jumio’s AI Labs are developing deep learning models to dramatically improve identity verification accuracy and verification speed. The team is led by Labhesh Patel, CTO and Chief Scientist at Jumio, who is expanding his team of machine learning engineers and AI specialists in Montreal to realize this important mission and maintain Jumio’s global leadership in AI-powered identity verification. Artificial intelligence has already been productionalized to reduce the time it takes to verify an ID document or an online identity which, in turn, is helping Jumio’s customers reduce their abandonment rates and increase new account conversions. In fact, Jumio’s AI models have reduced the average customer transaction time by 7 percent, with more significant reductions planned for the fourth quarter.

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